Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to write cache protection of purpose built backup appliances in a computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Large amounts of data have to be processed daily and the current trend suggests that these amounts will continue being ever-increasing in the foreseeable future. An efficient way to alleviate the problem is by using purpose built backup appliances that contain advanced function such as data deduplication. The idea of a purpose built backup appliance containing advanced capability such as data deduplication is to exploit the fact that large parts of available data are copied, again and again, by locating repeated data and storing only its first occurrence. Subsequent copies are replaced with pointers to the stored occurrence, which significantly reduces the storage requirements if the data is indeed repetitive. However, a significant need exists for minimizing the hardware footprint in a computing network during deduplication, for example, along with providing enterprise class high availability and load balancing for systems with redundancy.